Month: April 2010

I upgraded to ubuntu Lucid yesterday, and I was totally disappointed with the new user experience they are trying^Wforcing with their ‘indicate’ applet.

At first, I was not using indicate applet in Karmic, so after the upgrade I didn’t have the indicate applet neither.

Rhythmbox’s icon when not playing was modified to be blank&white but the icon when playing was not modified, so big inconsistency in the style.

Rhythmbox’s status icon behaviour is modified: it does not play/pause when middle click, right-click does nothing, left-click popup a revisited context-menu. There is no way to show/hide rb when clicking the status icon. Scrolling on the status icon does not change the volume of the playback anymore.

I don’t have the bluethoot icon anymore, but tbh it’s fine because I don’t use it anyway. But still, I see no way to add it back.

The volume applet is also removed from my panel with no way to add it back.

Then I decided to give a try to indicate applet, I get 4 icons:

bluetooth: exactly the same than without indicate, no way to remove it;

rhythmbox: with all the issues mentioned above;

volume: exactly the same than without indicate, they just made the bar horizontal instead of vertical;

IM: probably the worst, here are issues I had:

It force using evolution so it’s useless for thunderbird users like me.

the menu shows random contacts in it, I had no idea for which reason contacts appeared… turned out that it’s the last login/logout contact… there is no notification for that, so unless you have always the menu open you can’t understand any reason those contact are there.

Incoming call dialog to accept/reject the call steal your focus, so if you were typing, it will reject the call. Empathy upstream fix that by blinking the status icon instead of poping a dialog. Yes, WM people claims that’s fixed 15years ago, blablabla, but no, poping a dialog STEALS the focus.

incoming message just turn the icon green, nothing blinking, so it’s really hard to notice. Even with upstream behaviour where the icon is blinking, lots of users complain it’s not noticable…

how am I supposed to know if I’m connected to IM??? When booting it does not connect IM accounts automatically, I have to click the IM indicator applet and open the contact list, and then magically it connects my accounts… how discoverable is that??? Using Empathy upstream, you directly see in the notification area an icon for your presence, and if you didn’t start empathy, you see that the icon is not there. In contrast the indicator IM applet is always there with no visual difference for your presence.

As an empathy developer I would like to add a comment on the very poor communication they had with us. Last year they started patching Empathy to use libindicate. They pushed packages in ubuntu karmic (when it was still in dev) without consulting upstream at all. They pushed empathy packages as we use “git commit” and opened an upstream bug attaching the ‘final’ patch. Upstream made an enormous list of comments pointing issues with the patch. While they fixed most of them, we still got lot of bugs reported in upstream by ubuntu users, adding more work for upstream dev. Guillaume Desmottes even lost several *days* of work to fix a nasty empathy crasher that turned out to be ubuntu’s patch fault.

So my conclusion, for my personal use case (maybe other users are happy with it?) that indicator is at best the same as upstream behaviour, but what they changed is getting worst. I don’t blame Ubuntu for trying new user experience, it was a good idea to explore, really. But what makes me totally disappointed is that there is no way to get back to the upstream behaviour if the user choose to not have the indicator applet.